How to Find duplicate and dead bookmarks in Firefox

People who spend a lot of their time over the internet, end up bookmarking several pages. I personally feel bookmarking is an art, it’s not just all about the pages you like, it takes a lot to handle the bookmarks and failing which, bookmarking ultimately turns out to be a useless feature.

Why ? Because if you don’t know how to organize your bookmarks, in such case, searching for bookmarked page under your ‘Bookmarks’ tab will probably take more time than Googling for the same page, LOL, don’t you agree with this? Moreover there are two major problems :

How do you know if the bookmarked pages had already been bookmarked before or not ?

If the existing bookmarks are still working or are they just dead links ?

Here is a new experimental add-on, which is built to take all round care of your Bookmarks in Firefox. This add-on checks bookmarks in your Firefox for

Duplications

Empty folders

Non existing (or deleted) pages etc.

So if you maintain a huge list of bookmarks, it will render the useless ones, because all the bookmarks which are duplicate of some other bookmark, which refer to a non existing page now are completely useless.

Once installed, you can access it under the Bookmarks tab of your FF, as shown here.

Accesing Checkplces for organizing Bookmarks

Once you click the ‘CheckPlaces’ you get to choose the checking parameters.

Check bookmarks for duplicate, dead etc

When done with this step, you can hit the ‘Check Bookmarks’ button to start the checking process, which at the end renders you a detailed status of pages which were found as duplicate, or not longer exist (i.e. failed pages), here you can choose to delete the reported bookmarks.

Result of Check on Bookmarks

I found this add-on very useful, it might help you by shortening the Bookmarks list for you, which is like moving towards an organized bookmarks tab in Firefox. Try this add-on, Check Places, and do share with us if you too found it useful, as we did.

About Manav Mishra

here to write articles about things which are somehow related to computers, internet (and at times, may be, to blogging as well). He wants to make an Identity for himself, he loves, testing new softwares and services which can really help to improve the productivity of individual.

Thanks for the article. Sadly, the addon has caused me a lot of grief in the last couple of days of trying it. I have about 1,400 bookmarks from 2008 alone, and I really needed something that would go through the bookmarks, check if the links still work and if there are any duplicates in there.

I tried Check Places, and out of 1,418 bookmarks it came back with 151 dead links and 23 duplicates.

The 451 dead links turned out to be working fine, only 50 or so were actually dead or had moved, the rest were perfectly fine.

I would strongly recommend you make a backup of your bookmarks.html prior to using this addon and being very thorough before committing any changes.